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Posts Tagged ‘infinite computing’

Today’s Media Day at Autodesk University at the Venetian in Las Vegas attracted 95 bloggers and journalists coming from 80 different countries. Also they expected 8,000 attendees to attend the event.

Chris Bradshaw, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, spoke on the topic, “Autodesk’s Evolving story,” in which he outlined the company’s history in relation to the changing technology.

He said revenues come from all three geographies – more than half the revenue comes from outside North America. Revenue breaks down to 28% from AEC, 24% from manufacturing, 10% from Media and Entertainment and 38% from PSEB.

He talked about how Autodesk was born during a disruptive time period of the mainframe shifting over to the personal computer. Yet today’s times are more disruptive, as the desktop internet went to a billion users. “With mobile devices we’re projecting 10s of billions of units,” said Bradshaw. “Many will have more than one of these things. I would guess many here have more than one mobile device, more than one accessing the cloud.” Which was proven with a show of hands in the room.

Steve Blum, senior vice president, Worldwide Sales & Services, spoke on “Customer Challenges.” He said that with the cloud you can leverage infinite computing and run a thousand different “what if” scenarios is 15 minutes and choose the best design option that meets your needs. The cloud and mobile are changing the way people get their jobs done.

“Today we have to look at what do we do when everyone is connected, how do we reimagine this?” Hanspal pointed out that social media wouldn’t exist if everyone wasn’t connected. “The minute we use the cloud, people assume we’re using a vendor made cloud product. What we’re trying to do is use the cloud where it’s useful and adds to the cloud, not cloud for cloud’s sake.”

The cloud is good for Connectivity, Content, Infinite computing, and Design for everyone.

What will we see in terms of cost for infinite computing after it’s in place?

You have two things going on simultaneously: you have a deep curve into the climbing price of computing – computing is the only asset that’s going down in price while everything else going up. From the commercial perspective we’re shifting some of the costs from customers back to us. Generally people providing this today are not as computer intensive – like Salesforce.com.

We’re affordably doing it; you can now try AutoCAD LT running off the cloud.

Right now the spot price for cloud computing is at 3 cents an hour.

If I’ve got infinite computing available, when and where do I make the decision to use it?

We’re going to have a hybrid computing model. Because of the tablet, there is incredible computing power and you don’t need to be connected. You’ll continue to have local devices – and the cloud for compute intensive jobs. We don’t build out our own cloud, for most of them we are trying to use commoditized resources, if you need an answer within short period of time you pay more; there are some models like this. What if people are able to solve problems they were never able to solve before?

We think the cloud is a choice. Some customers no longer want the local choice, where they need power and resources; they want another choice of deployment. Choice is available to all customers. Pricing models are changing; mobile devices are putting pressure on the market. The way we can use infinite computing is by offering different models for those who only need this software two hours a month.

I’m not sure if it has any fundamental pressure on pricing in general, what pressure it does introduce is offset by greater capability. The price of fundamental resources goes down while capabilities go far up.

What kind of delivery models will you see?

You’ll see electronic software downloads rather than boxes, some people deploying through streaming, etc., and other services that purely exist in the cloud only. You’ll have a variety. We’re looking at our subscription program for people to get information on options.

What about Autodesk’s growth?

Our business without acquisitions is no better or worse than other years, we have 12-15% growth rate in 2010, and that can be changed by economic conditions and by acquisitions. We have factored in the idea of infinite computing but at a low level.

Are you addressing multicore?

We have done a lot of multicore work on our products. It works only when you’re doing a lot of the same thing, like sorting a lot of data items. Our studies show it accounts for only about 15 percent of what engineers do. That’s why the breakthrough is making the cloud available. We can run a larger analysis process across more iterations.

We have some amount of work in foundation stuff, there are some ways to do things in a multithreaded way. It’s a valuable technique, not quite as valuable in general purpose computing as you might think. We’re much more interested in what allows you to optimize an answer to a question.

What about the consumer market?

Our customers are mostly professionals, 1 percent top account for 30 percent of our revenue, 70% of customers account for other revenue. Historically we haven’t done much with consumers, SketchBook Pro is way past 2 million people who have downloaded it, and it has done amazingly well. It’s phenomenal in what it’s been able to do in terms of generating awareness. Selling SketchBook at $8.99 is not a way to make profitable business but it has done a great job of raising awareness, to understand also what people are looking for. There is a greater influence of the consumer market going back into the professional market.

We need to pay attention to the consumer market and see what is going on, such as the community that gets created around Flickr, that social community around professionals. I don’t think our business will change to become a consumer business, although we have more people coming in at the entry stage as new users and students, a feeder population, and are getting people interested in design and math.

We need tools that everyone can take advantage of.

People are more interested in moving things to mobile devices. Open source was the end of an era – commodization. There is still open source software out there successfully deployed in server based environments, but most of our software doesn’t fall into that category.

A full report of AU will come out on Monday in AECWeekly. In a nutshell, the event really focused on yet-unreleased technology, that are in Autodesk Labs, with the exception of “infinite computing.”

Infinite computing is another word for the cloud. Tw o products for the cloud shipped in September are Green Building Studio and AutoCAD WS. GBS is a natural for this – it has terabytes of data and the cloud enables you to download it as you need it. Other technologies that will benefit from this treatment are rendering and finite element analysis in the cloud, where users will not have to maintain expensive systems to house large amounts of data.

Autodesk’s new subscription program adds value with new features to products such as infinite computing and web services. Basically, users will be able to augment their desktop with point functionality from the cloud. The model is changing in that it offers different services to different tiers of customers based on what they need. The platinum, or enterprise tier for example, will receive a rapid response feature from technical support and also support for older versions of software. The consulting team will also map their process to see how to better serve them.